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Comment Damn (Score 1) 12

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

Comment What's the core of the project? (Score 1) 23

Is there some problem particular to human DNA that they are looking to solve; or is this just an extension of the ongoing work on DNA synthesis(if you are OK with relatively short segments that has come down to being something you can just order, not nearly as exotic as it once was) but being hyped because there's some human cell genetic engineering at the end; rather than just meeting more aggressive targets for achievable lengths?

Comment Re:Yep (Score 1) 84

Doing both (long low-impedance wire and more storage) would have made a lot of sense. Storage is still ridiculously expensive, and with both, you have redundancy.

The general principle of time-shifting solar PV across time zones (and geographically moving wind power output across weather systems) makes so much sense that humans will probably fail to get it done because we seem to be erring on the side of parochialism, xenophobia, and collective stupidity these days.

My cynicism is borne of long experience with the highly sub-optimal and environmentally destructive decisions we have been collectively making over the last 4 decades.

Comment Re:dust (Score 4, Insightful) 86

The paper claims that the photochemistry of the particles is important to the process; allows them to generate free oxygen at the target site when illuminated without the downsides of just shoving hydrogen peroxide into your sinuses and oxidizing things indiscriminately.

I'm unclear on why small magnetic particles are being called 'robots' now; by that logic you could claim that laser printers use nanorobot swarms to produce text; or that paint is actually an aqueous suspension of visual-band signaling nanites; but it sounds like the surface chemistry of the particles is an important part of the process.

If you were using iron you might be able to get similar effects by inductive heating once you delivered them to the target area; you absolutely could destroy cells in the immediate proximity that way; but it would come down to what option is easier to tightly control and, ideally, more discriminating between bacteria and local human cells. I assume that the actually-qualified people chose photochemistry and free oxygen over inductive heating for good reasons; but I don't know how they compare.

Comment Re:Is weird that LinuxSteam is still 32 bit (Score 1) 61

It's not that weird. Much of what Steam sells won't run as expected without some amount of 32 bit support(you are much less likely to find that the main game is 32 bit for anything that got a cross platform release with an 8th gen console, since all but the switch had more than 4GB of RAM; but absolutely no promises on every config launcher or random middleware component); and the steam client itself has, thankfully, remained comparatively lightweight. Probably not as light as it could be; but on the speedier end of programs that are basically web browsers with some background extras.

Not being 64 bit is more of an issue in cases where your one program is the only reason an entire 32 bit support environment is being loaded up; but that's very unlikely to be the case on a windows gaming system and fairly unlikely to be the case on a linux gaming one; and is no longer a terribly relevant consideration on MacOS now that Apple just executed all the 32 bit stuff. Maybe more people than I think are running Steam on TV-connected PCs purely as a remote play client?

It's not desperately elegant; and if they were holding off because they viewed it as an actually hard problem you' be a bit worried about either the state of the codebase or the people working on it; but it's hard to make a strong case for a 64 bit steam client being a particularly urgent priority; given the software that you normally use steam to install and run.

Comment Re:Curious... (Score 1) 96

I just said wifi 6 because that's what all the stuff on their website was. That's what struck me as weirdly unambitious for someone who is pushing a wiring standard capable of substantially more.

I don't write marketing copy; but if I were emphasizing the superiority of fiber I would have bulked out the list of models with at least a few blatantly 10Gb or higher options; rather than a bunch of random undemanding APs.

Comment Curious... (Score 3, Interesting) 96

What seems very odd about the page of Huawei fiber-to-the-room products is how unambitious they are.

Sure, if you want to do ethernet at nontrivial distances or above 10Gb fiber is where it's at; but why are you selling fiber as the glorious enabling technology for a bunch of wifi 6 APs that will be lucky to actually need 2.5GbE; with 'power over fiber' cabling which presumably means pulling a bunch of copper anyway and is significantly length-limited?

There are, absolutely, circumstances where having fiber runs would be invaluable; it just seems like "a wifi AP in every room so the signal doesn't suck!" is basically the least fiber-relevant use case going.

Comment Oh really? (Score 1) 27

Aside from the usual caveats about being 'on the cusp of', rather than having actually delivered; how revolutionary would '100 deepseeks' be?

I enjoyed watching Altman squirm at least as much as anyone, possibly more; but that didn't change the fact that deepseek developed an unexpectedly cheap way to do something that, so far, an entire industry is busy losing money on because the reality has had a desperately bad time living up to the hype.

If some of these 'deepseeks' end up delivering on things that matter more that could be an item of some interest; but if it's all doing questionably useful things somewhat more cheaply than the VC whisperers it should be hilarious to watch but not desperately relevant.

Comment How separable is 'marketing'? (Score 1) 57

I'm curious how you peel off marketing at a company that is really playing two, perhaps three, entirely different games of it in parallel; some of which are actually closely aligned with real techical work.

There's the consumer facing stuff; 'intel inside' stickers and sponsoring overclocking influencers and whatnot. Probably aligns with some poking at engine and middleware vendors to make sure that the characteristics Intel adds to their chips are catered to, whether that be new instructions or not behaving pathologically on heterogeneous cores; but it's not obvious that terribly close coordination would be needed; and (while I sincerely doubt that Accenture will end up being good value) it's easiest to imagine a more weakly coupled consumer marketing effort off doing its thing.

The marketing to low-information institutional buyers (like the now-infamous slide deck about "hey howdy purchasing managers; did you know that sometimes Core i3 is newer and better even though Ryzen 5 has bigger number; which seem unpossible?) is presumably also viable to farm out in its most basic form; but presumably requires some fairly detailed(and potentially contentious, since those have their own interests to look after) coordination with the PC OEMs unless they just want it to be some slightly goofy talking points for dealing with people who buy computers the same way they buy commodity reagents and paper towels.

The marketing to higher-information institutional customers seems like it would lean heavily technical pretty quickly. There's some lightweight stuff aimed at IT director Bob who remembers when he 'knew computers' hands on 30 years ago and continues to read about it at a high-ish level in industry trade magazines and whitepapers; but it fairly quickly gets somewhat meatier in terms of the OEM and ISV assisting/cajoling required to ensure that the vague sense that nobody ever got fired for specifying Intel, the compatible and validated high performance solution for your critical business requirements, remains at least reasonably true; and gets straight into inserting real engineers to talk to other people's real engineers in order to get what you want from emerging OCP specs; ensure that QAT and AES-NI and such are considered relevant to networking performance, that telcos with vRAN problems actually consider AVX to be a part of the solution; and so on. Maybe you can peel off the part that's just faff and vibes for IT Director Bob; but it seems like people would notice if Intel's OCP people were replaced by random Accenture dudes.

Finally you've got the relationship with the OEMs; which definitely has some pure marketing stuff(like the various 'incentives' for advertising OEM systems if they were intel based); but in large part(especially if Intel actually wants to make money, not just discount their way into volume) relies on some largely technical things being true: "we can supply the complete, mature, solution for a thin-and-light from consumer to enterprise; while AMD is busy trying to munge shit together with Mediatek and ASMedia and Realtek" is a simple enough marketing message; but its continued viability can only be sustained by charisma for so long: it has to actually bet true that your CPU/iGPU is at least acceptable enough to not scuttle sales; that your CNVio2 wifi saves money, or is at least a wash, vs. the competitor's m.2 PCIe while being as good or better; that an intel i219 or i225 will be dead reliable and allow AMT enablement for the corporate buyers while AMD is messing around with Realtek's DASH firmware; that the OEM will get actual engineering support if Intel Smart Sound Technology isn't or if they need to deal with some ACPI fuckery that is ruining battery life. It's not like there would be no marketing people involved in spreading the message; but that seems like something more or less wholly inseparable(without drastic damage) from internal, relatively core, technical teams.

Obviously, in a trivial sense, you can always farm something out in the sense of paying someone else to pay people to do things rather than just paying those same people to do those same things directly; but unless your payroll and HR departments are fucked up beyond words you are unlikely to save money by just adding that sort of intermediary; so presumably they have something more in mind. I'm just not sure how it is supposed to work.

If you are just doing low-information vibes marketing that seems pretty readily farmed out; but that's also the sort of thing that is(or ought to be) comparatively cheap; while the more valuable and compelling marketing messages pretty quickly move to being direct technical commitments in a way that seems like it would be an awkward jump if your marketing is external but your engineering remains internal.

Comment Re:If the shoe fits... (Score 1) 24

The two aren't actually so different. You do get to make economic arguments a lot more openly about copyright(while, when it comes to killing, we normally make them relatively quietly and circumspectly when the unpleasant matter of what risks to the public are just part of The March of Progress and which ones are negligent or reckless comes up. We prefer not to talk about it; and have some proxies like 'VSL/ICAF' to help; but we do it); but the classifications are ultimately a policy thing and open to amendment as needed.

"Murder" superficially resembles a stable category just because of a true-by-definition trick: we call it 'murder' if a killing is unlawful and forbidden(or, rhetorically, if we think it ought to be unlawful and forbidden); so there's always a strong anti-murder consensus because everyone is against killings that are forbidden, except a few Raskolnikov-type edgelords. What there is not is actually a consensus on what killings we are or aren't against. The people who think that every other defensive option must be exhausted and the ones who are just itching to castle-doctrine the next fool who steps over the property line are both anti-murder; but not entirely in agreement on what that means; same with the current dispute over whether euthanasia is a legitimate exercise of self determination or nihilistic hyper-sin; or any of the wartime arguments over where 'collateral damage' stops being unfortunate-but-proportionate and just goes into being bulk murder.

It is somewhat more common to find(in public, not so much remotely in the vicinity of legislative power) people who will outright claim to be against copyright; because they do not consider any derivative works to be legitimately unauthorized; but here it's a more or less straightforward fight between two entities that would both claim to be in favor of copyright; but who differ on whether setting up a data mine in the BBC's backyard is copyright infringement or not.

Comment Re:"News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" (Score 4, Informative) 57

He's the founder and CEO of one of the companies HP bought during Apotheker's...impressive...string of failures. That was in 2011; but it remained in the news first when HP wrote down their 10.3 billion dollar buy by 8.8 billion dollars; then when the litigation began by HP against previous management on the theory that they must have been cooking the books a bit for things to go so wrong so fast under HP's illustrious management.

The charges stuck against the CFO; but the CEO and VP of finance were acquitted. Then the VP of finance got hit by a car; and the CEO's celebratory yacht outing took a literal turn when the ship capsized and he died; then the VP of finance finished succumbing to his head injuries and died less than 48 hours later.

I'm not sure anyone thinks well enough of HP's ability to execute to seriously suspect them; but the background probably didn't reduce interest in getting a nice decisive root cause for the boat issue.

Comment Awfully convenient (Score 1) 59

What they are not saying, but what I suspect is part of the plan, is that the numbers only work out if you actively move toward being more locked in to their products.

If you just want the basic vsphere-managing-a-few-ESXi-hosts setup the bundle is stupidly expensive; but if you try to justify the cost of the bundle by using other parts of it you end up with a system that is significantly harder to migrate away when Broadcom decides to alter the deal further.

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